Single Handed
by Riha Hyesthae
Summary: An expansion on "Salvage". Gast discovers Vincent hidden in the Shinra lab before Hojo can lock him away in the Nibelheim crypt. He and Ifalna do their best to help Vincent recover from trauma he can't describe or explain.
1. Tame

If she were perfectly honest with herself, Ifalna was afraid of Vincent. She had not been friends with him the way Lucy had. Turks had always made her a little nervous. How could anyone be heartless enough to take lives for a living? However, she'd never seen him hold a gun although she knew he carried two. He'd never pulled one out, never showed it off. She'd never even see him take one out to clean or reload it. She'd never seen him use it either, although he had a reputation for only needing one bullet, no matter the target. He was tall, over six feet, and strong despite his deceptively skinny frame. When it came down to it, Vincent didn't need a gun to kill.

But he had been kind to Lucy, polite to her, and even civil to Hojo. Gast had liked him, but Gast liked everyone. The Professor's kindness was his greatest strength as well as his most dire weakness. It never entered his head that not everyone was as nice as he was. That kindness was why there was a one-armed, emaciated, half-mad Turk in their back bedroom.

Prior to his disappearance, Vincent had been like one of his unseen guns, his sharp mind and potential deadliness concealed behind a an unassuming, almost shy demeanor and quiet courtesy. Now, however, he behaved more like a rabid animal. She tried to treat him the way she had the stray dogs and alley cats that had come to scavenge the garbage behind Midgar University. The animals had not been born vicious, and only attacked because they were ill, or had been treated cruelly and were afraid for their lives.

"Can't you do something for him?" Gast asked one long, cold night. Vincent had been sitting rocking on the floor for hours, his lips moving but making no sound. Every time Gast tried to approach him, the Turk panicked and tried to attack him. Gast was half as tall as Vincent, but far more sturdily built and nearly as strong. He'd grappled with Vincent once. It had been enough to make him realize that even a one-armed Turk was more than one scientist could handle.

Ifalna looked at Vincent as he muttered to himself; at his shaggy, grown-out hair, at his red eyes, at the sharp angles of joints beneath the too-short pajamas. Was he any different than the old pitbull who'd chewed her front paws raw, or the canary who had pulled his own feathers out? Vincent was ill and in pain. He'd been treated harshly- they did not yet know by who- and the memory of that pain was stronger than the comfort to be had in the present.

"Vincent?" she asked softly. "Vincent?"

He did not look up. Turning sideways, she carefully edged toward him as she might a strange animal. Aware that even ill and injured he could make short work of her, she stopped just out of reach and slowly sank to a crouch.

"Vincent? Can you hear me?"

It didn't look like it. Wherever he was inside his own head, it was too far away for her voice to reach him. Hesitantly, she stretched and touched his foot. At once he snapped out of it, jumped, and scrambled back against the corner faster than she would have thought possible. Eyes glowing in the weak light of the oil lamp, he looked back at her in undisguised terror, his chest heaving panic breaths beneath the worn flannel.

"It's alright," she said gently, keeping her voice low and calm. "It's Ifalna. Iffy. Do you remember me?"

The fear had faded to confusion. He was still wary, but no longer on the razor edge of fight-or-flight.

"I kept plants in the greenhouse. Lucy and I were friends. Do you remember?"

The glow in his eyes had dimmed, but he still looked frightened and perplexed. Slowly, she got to her feet and Vincent tried to edge back further despite the fact that she was less than half his size, and he had nowhere to go.

"It's okay," she assured him. "You're safe here. No one is going to hurt you. You're among friends."

It was hard to keep the hand she held out to him from shaking. For all she knew, he would lunge at her and try to tear her throat out with his teeth. For several minutes she stood as still as she could manage, the muscles in her arm aching from holding her hand out. Eventually, Vincent pushed away from the wall and cautiously edged toward her. Instinct told her to return the gesture, to move towards him, but she made herself stand still. He needed to know that she was not going to invade his space, that if he wanted her help, he could come to her.

She could have cried as his long, bony fingers hesitantly touched hers. Slowly, she turned her hand so that her palm faced the ceiling and was rewarded as Vincent stiffly wrapped his own hand around it.

"I just want to help," she told him, taking her time in turning to face him fully. Vincent just watched and held on, more bemused than anything. It was as if she were someone he had only met once or twice and he was having trouble matching a name to the face.

"Do you remember me?"

For several minutes he stood and stared at her, the silence stretching so long that she feared either he hadn't heard, or didn't understand. Then he nodded.

"You do remember?"

Another nod, this one more sure than the first. He might not remember every instance, but he was looking at her now as if he did know her, it had simply been years since the last time he'd seen her. Except it hadn't.

"It's okay," she said, her words as much to assure herself as him, "it'll come to you."

Except she wasn't sure it would.

* * *

Once the mako saturation wore off, Vincent no longer slept through the night. At first they let him be. If he wanted to keep odd hours, that was his business. He'd settle into a more normal routine eventually. Ifalna could never be certain, but she was pretty sure Vincent had stayed up for nearly five days straight at one point. When he finally did become too exhausted to stay awake, he wouldn't sleep for long. He'd wake up screaming after only a few hours, practically foaming at the mouth in panic, his bed sheets ruined.

Gast tried leaving books in his room, but Vincent didn't touch them. He tried talking to him, tried to get him to write as a way to communicate, but the Turk wouldn't participate. Mostly he wandered the house, or sat and stared at the coal fire in the furnace as if the dancing flames held the secret to making him well again. Ifalna couldn't help wondering if there was even a small piece left of the person he'd been before?

She put an extra pillow on his bed to give him something to hold onto if he wanted, and moved the clock radio to his nightstand so that he wouldn't have to listen to the demons in his head. The arm chair that was too tall for Gast was wedged through the door into Vincent's room as well, so that he wouldn't have to stay in bed all the time. Even though he was well over thirty, she plugged a night light into the wall socket, and left the hall light on to keep the shadows away. Anyone else might have been insulted by the reappearance of objects not employed to cope with nightmares since childhood. Vincent, bless him, was sufficiently overwrought that he took no offense at- or even any notice of- her attempts to indirectly offer comfort.

The pain that radiated off him like heat felt like that of a broken bone unset and unsplinted; or an open wound, still raw and bleeding. They might be able to set the jagged edges of his psyche together, but how she and Gast were to bind them up and allow them to heal, she had no idea. Half the time he didn't seem to know where he was or who they were. She had watched him transform twice, and wondered it the creatures he had become were manifestations of something internal?

 _Such a thing should not happen under the sun._

Ifalna did not disagree, but the ghosts gathered in the room could not help, only offer their opinion.

 _It saved his life,_ she thought, feeling as if she ought to defend Vincent. It wasn't his fault he was so damaged. Rather, she assumed it was not his fault. They still had no idea how he'd gotten this way.

 _It is not the stone,_ her grandfather continued. _Ages ago, when Gaia was young, there were those who would become vessels of the Planet's guardians. They would carry materia inside their bodies as this man does. It is not his union with Lord Chaos that is anathema, it is the other lives trapped inside of him._

 _Other lives?_ she echoed, thinking of the transformations she'd witnessed: the Behemoth and the blonde giant with the skin grafts.

 _Yes,_ her grandmother confirmed. _It is not right to bind the spirit of one man to the blood and bone of another, especially when they are strangers._

It would make sense. Someone had operated on Vincent, the scars were proof of that, but she and Gast had no idea why. Perhaps it had been an attempt to save his life? The bullet hole was the ugliest of his healed wounds, and if the damage it had caused had necessitated organ donation… But Vincent was not taking any sort of anti-rejection medication. He wasn't receiving any sort of medicine at all. Approaching him with a syringe was a surefire way to send him into a blind panic, and he had a hard enough time swallowing food without choking that Gast hadn't dared to attempt offering him pills.

 _But how did it happen?_ she asked. _How is it even POSSIBLE?_

Her late family seemed just as bewildered as she, but far less shocked by it. Perhaps there had been a similar case once before, eons ago, that had ended badly.

 _Blood and tissue may be freely given,_ her grandfather went on, _but a man's spirit is his own. Whatever happened, it was not done lawfully. It may have allowed this man to live, but it would have been better if he had died. The mind was not meant to be shared like this. If he hasn't already gone mad, he surely will._

 _Isn't there anything we can do for him?_

 _No,_ her mother said sadly. _Wounds like his do not heal. It would be kinder to put an end to his suffering._

"No," she said aloud, as much to herself as the ghosts around her. "No, there has to be a way. There _has_ to."

In her heart, however, she wondered if there was?


	2. Missing Persons

"Shouldn't we report this to corporate?" Ifalna asked.

Gast shifted where he sat and pretended to squint at the stained specimen on the microscope slide for a few more seconds.

"Won't the Turks want to know where he is? It's been five years since Nibelheim. They probably think he's dead!"

"Well, maybe that's not a bad thing," Gast said slowly, finally looking up from the slide.

"How in gaia is that a good thing?" Ifalna countered.

"Turks don't retire, Ifalna, you know that as well as I do," he began. "For all we know, his own people did this to him."

That brought her up short. "I thought you said you found him in lab storage?"

Gast nodded. "I did, but it was sheer accident. He wasn't labeled. Maybe they thought he was dead, maybe he'd been left there to die. My guess is he was waiting to be transported down to Deepground. I've heard the rumors, but hadn't put any faith in them until now."

"So you think the Turks did that to him?" she gestured broadly in the direction of Vincent's room. "Took off his arm, removed his tongue, did gods know what to his insides. You really think they would disappear him into the experimental treatment unit?"

He had no answer for that.

"What if...what if they weren't trying to disappear him?" Ifalna went on. "What if sending him to Deepground was the only way to make him better? They have had good results. Look what they did for the Lost Unit. They were all prisoners of war for years, and now they're fine!"

It was grasping at straws and she knew it. If Vincent had been sent to Deepground for therapeutic reasons and not as test subject, he would have been delivered wrapped in care and blankets, and not naked in a metal coffin. Perhaps the Turks had thought he was dead already and the only reason Vincent had been in lab storage was because he was awaiting an autopsy?

"I don't know," Gast confessed. "I think it's possible. I also think it might be best for us to keep him under wraps for now, at least until he can tell us what happened to him."

"Faremis, that may never happen."

It was Gast's turn to fall silent.

"Professor, we both know he's not in his right mind. What we don't know is how he got this way, and he may never be able to tell us. We have to consider the possibility that while he may recover, it may only be to a point. I want to help him but…" she trailed off and swallowed hard. "He needs more help than we can give him."

Standing, Gast crossed the floor and faced her, resting both hands on her shoulders.

"We're all he's got, Iffy," he told her earnestly. "I don't want to risk throwing a sick man to the wolves. We can't tell corporate where he is. Not yet. I know he's a handful but...I believe in you. I believe we can do this. He was my responsibility, you all were. It's my fault this happened to him. I've got to do what I can for him, even if it isn't much more than to make sure he's comfortable."

Reluctantly, Ifalna nodded. "I want to believe I can help him too but… I really have no idea what I'm doing. Nothing seems to help. Most of the time he sounds like screaming, and when he doesn't sound like screaming, he sounds like crying. I wish I knew how to make it stop for him."

"So do I," Gast said, pulling her into a hug. "So do I…"

* * *

Veld was getting sick of losing things. That made two more kids out of commission. At least they'd lived. What would become of them in the end, he wasn't sure. Tally was still kicking- figuratively, anyway- but he wasn't sure the current president would be as forgiving as the last. Veld might have to take it upon himself to make sure that the kids never talked. It needn't be as gruesome as the general populace thought. Far more targets had been disappeared than killed, but Shinra and the rest of the world didn't need to know that. Maybe he'd have to add these two to the bunch, set them up with a nice retirement package if they couldn't recover fully. He hoped they would. Neither of them were thirty yet. Kids. Babies. When had he gotten so old?

He was also getting sick of cleaning up messes that he hadn't made. Since when had the Turks become Shinra's janitors? There had been a time when the suit had meant something, but now… Veld was many things, but stupid was not one of them. Shinra Sr. had treated the Turks like his own personal bodyguards, and less like a flock of armed servants. Veld would have liked to say that the boy was just being careless, but he knew better. The younger Shinra had his favorites, namely those too young to be loyal to his old man. Maybe he thought he was being subtle, being clever, but no one could out-subtle a Turk. He was weeding out the people he thought he couldn't trust by any means necessary, and in the process was only making himself more enemies. It was not wise to make enemies of the people who were supposed to protect you and all your corporate secrets.

There were a number of secrets Veld wished he hand an answer for: what had become of his wife and daughter, why the training exercise that had burned Kalm to the ground had gone so horribly wrong, and most recently, what had become of his friend and old partner? "Recently" was perhaps putting it generously. Five years ago Vincent had been part of the team that had been sent out to Nibelheim. Veld had pushed Tally to send him in the hopes that Vince and Lucy could work things out. Seven months later, the team had returned minus one Turk. Veld had asked, sneaked, spied, threatened, pleaded, employed every tactic he knew to try to find out what had become of his friend, but no one knew. Even Lucy had been silent, only telling him that there had been an accident, and that he should ask Hojo. The senior assistant had not been very forthcoming, and then there had been another tragedy and everyone else had forgotten about Vincent.

Veld had not forgotten. Every so often he opened the old case file that he kept stored next to Linda and Felicia's. All three were depressingly slim, barely more than two or three pages each. In his mind, they were still open cases, even if he was the only one still looking. Tally told him to let it go, to grieve and move on, but he couldn't. Even if all three of them were dead and gone, the needed to know how, he needed to know why. It wouldn't bring them back, but it would give him a certain amount of peace.

Linda, Elfe, Vincent, and now Lucrecia, all gone. It didn't seem right or fair, but few things in life were. Lucy's death had been straight-forward enough, there was no need to further investigate a rough pregnancy that had ended in tragedy. She was not the first, and she would not be the last woman to die in childbirth; even in this modern age such things could still happen. Nothing fishy there, just deeply unfortunate. The other three, however… Linda and Elfe had never been formally identified. Veld was not content to let them rest unless he could prove for certain that they had died. Vincent did not even have the excuse of a major disaster to obscure his disappearance. He had simply dropped off the face of gaia. If anyone could disappear like that, it would be a Turk, but Vincent had no reason cut and run that Veld was aware of. No, something had happened, and Veld was going to find out what.


End file.
